Blockchain in brief: Six ways it can transform higher education

1. Using a blockchain for automatic recognition and transfer of credits

The decline in first-time, first-year student enrollments is having a real financial impact on a number of institutions across the United States and focusing on transfer students (a pool of prospects twice as large) has become an important strategy for many. But credit articulation presents a real challenge for institutions bringing in students from community colleges. While setting standardized articulation requirements across the nation presents a high hurdle, blockchain-supported initiatives may hold great promise for university and city education systems looking to streamline educational mobility in their communities.

2. Blockchains for tracking intellectual property and rewarding use and re-use of that property

If researchers were able to publish openly and accurately assess the use of their resources, the access-prohibitive costs of academic book and journal publications could be circumvented, whether for research- or teaching-oriented outputs. Accurately tracking the sharing of knowledge without restrictions has transformative potential for open-education models.

The data footprint of higher education institutions is enormous. With FERPA regulations as well as local and international requirements for the storage and distribution of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), maintaining this data in various institutional silos magnifies the risk associated with a data breach. Using sovereign identities to limit the proliferation of personal data promotes better data hygiene and data lifecycle management and could realize significant efficiency gains at the institutional level.

4. Using a blockchain as a lifelong learning passport

Educational institutions and private businesses partner with online course delivery giants to extend the reach of their educational services and priorities. Traditional educational routes are increasingly less normal and in this expanding world of providers, the need for verifiable credentials from a number of sources is growing. Producing a form of digitally “verifiable CVs” would limit credential fraud, and significantly reduce organizational workload in credential verification.

5. Using blockchains to permanently secure certificates

The open source solution Blockcerts already enables signed certificates to be posted to a blockchain and supports the verification of those certificates by third parties.

When an institution issues official transcripts, obtaining copies can be expensive and burdensome for graduates. But student-owned digital transcripts put the power of secure verification in the hands of learners, eliminating the need for lengthy and costly transcripts to further their professional or educational pursuits. An early mover, Central New Mexico Community College, debuted digital diplomas on the blockchain in December of 2017.

6. Using blockchains to verify multi-step accreditation

As different accreditors recognize different forms of credentials and a growing diversity of educational providers issue credentials, checking the ‘pedigree’ of a qualification can be laborious. Turning a certification verification process from a multi-stage research effort into a single-click process will automate many thousands of labor hours for organizations and institutions

Pearson Is Selling Its US K-12 Business—Despite Posting a Profit and Digital Growth

Pearson’s digital textbook transformation will likely face stiff competition. Earlier this month, McGraw-Hill, Barnes & Noble Education and Chegg teamed up for a new digital textbook rental program that the trio claims can help students save as much as 70 percent from buying print copies. In August, Cengage will launch a buffet-style offering where students pay $119.99 a semester to access all of the company’s digital higher-ed materials.
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more on OER in this IMS bloghttp://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oer

Additional question related: why not use already existing solutions, as used across the world. Alex response: open source. Tim: content available across institutions. text banks and other data can be grouped by disciplines. Follow up q/n: MLNC, OER Commons. Solution already exists and why don’t we use existing accumulated work. Answer by Karen: pulling many resources, promoting collaboration btw 2 and 4 year institutions. Bigger then just having a repository, collaborative effort on different levels

Access to a “sandbox” to test Islandora: who to contact when and how.

Alex response to “estimated date for faculty upload” – August 2018 approximately

Transferability/ compatible: how east it is to migrate Islandora content to a different platform (e.g. the Minnesota Library Publishing Project) shall other platform is chosen as MN OER platform?

How will this structure ensure that the OER initiative (Islandora in particular) is not “owned” by one branch on campus (e.g. librarians) but it is a mutual effort by faculty and staff (e.g. ATT) in terms of access, e.g. access to different admin levels in Islandora?

From the Adobe COnnect online attendees:

Barbara Sandarin: Regarding “Admin. Rights,” does this restrict who may upload items?

p. 4 “Modern university libraries require remote access for large numbers of concurrent users, with fewer authentication steps and more flexible digital rights management (DRM) to satisfy student demand”. They found the most frequent problem was that core reading list titles were not available to libraries as e-books.

p. 5 Overcoming the “textbook taboo”

In the US, academic software firm bepress notes that, in response to increased student textbook costs: “Educators, institutions, and even state legislators are turning their attention toward Open Educational Resources (OER)” in order to save students money while increasing engagement and retention. As a result bepress has developed its infrastructure to host and share OER within and across institutions.21 The UMass Library Open Education Initiative estimates it has saved the institution over $1.3 million since its inception in 2011. 22 Other textbook initiatives include SUNY Open Textbooks, developed by the State University of New York Libraries, which has already published 18 textbooks, and OpenStax, developed by Rice University.

p.5. sceptics about OER rapid progress still see potential in working with publishers.

Knowledge Unlatched 23 is an example of this kind of collaboration: “We believe that by working together libraries and publishers can create a sustainable route to Open Access for scholarly books.” Groups of libraries contribute to fund publication though a crowdfunding platform. The consortium pays a fixed upfront fee for the publisher to publish the book online under a Creative Commons license.

p.6.Technology: from library systems to educational technology.The rise of the library centric reading list system

big increase in the number of universities in the UK, Australia and New Zealand deploying library reading lists solutions.The online reading list can be seen as a sort of course catalogue that gives the user a (sometimes week-by-week) course/module view on core resources and provides a link to print holdings information or the electronic full text. It differs significantly from the integrated library system (ILS) ‘course reserve’ module, notably by providing access to materials beyond the items in the library catalogue. Titles can be characterised, for example as ‘recommended’ or ‘essential’ reading and citations annotated.

Reading list software brings librarians and academics together into a system where they must cooperate to be effective. Indeed some librarians claim that the reading list system is a key library tool for transforming student learning.

Higher education institutions, particularly those in Australia, New Zealand and some other parts of Europe (including the UK) are more likely to operate a reading list model, supplying students with a (sometimes long) list of recommended titles.

p.8. E-book platforms (discusses only UK)

p.9. Data: library management information to learning analytics

p.10. Leadership“Strong digital leadership is a key feature of effective educational organisations and its absence can be a significant barrier to progress. The digital agenda is therefore a leadership issue”. 48 (Rebooting learning for the digital age: What next for technology-enhanced higher education? Sarah Davies, Joel Mullan, Paul Feldman. Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) Report 93. February 2017. )

#DLNchat: What Is the Role of Libraries in Digital Learning Innovation?

special guest Steven Bell, Associate Librarian at Temple University Libraries
Tuesday, February 27 when the #DLNchatcommunity got together to discuss: What Is the Role of Libraries in Digital Learning Innovation?

“it will definitely be a more sustainable initiative if it is collaborative—-whether it’s OER, open access journals, etc…if the library wants to go alone it will go fast but if it goes with others it will go much further.”

The #DLNchat community concurred there are ample opportunities for library-led collaborations in digital learning across campus. “Curation is key

fair use >> . transformation: 1. add / subtract from original 2. use for different purpose; >> parody songs – using enough of music and words to recognize the song, but not enough to it to be copyright infrigement. memes.

students’ use of copyrighted works. students may: use the entire copyrighted work but not publish openly

copyright act #110 (1) applies to F2F teaching.

copyright act #110 (2) applies to Hybrid/Online teaching. exception one digital copy can made and uploaded on D2L. reasonable and limited portions of dramatic musical or audiovisual works

with a growing number of initiatives, publishers, and economic models, the question is sustainability. There are a number of different models, including Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and numerous university and commercial publishers who have open monograph publications, thus more initiatives than we could include for this one-hour webinar. We have invited a selected number of representatives from various open monograph publishing initiatives to participate in a panel discussion about their current economic models and future of open access monographs. Each panelist will give a brief statement about their initiative, their editorial review process, their funding model, and their perspectives on the future of open access monographs. Following their brief statements, we will have a question and answer period moderated by Kevin Smith, the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas.

Participants for the panel include:

AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative– Wendy Pradt Lougee, University Librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of American University Presses (AAUP) are implementing a new initiative with 13 universities and 60 university presses participating. Universities will provide subventions for open digital monographs, to be published by university presses.

Lever Pressand Knowledge Unlatched – Charles Watkinson, Associate University Librarian for Publishing, University of Michigan Library, and Director, University of Michigan Press. University of Michigan Press and Amherst Press are partners in the Lever Press which is supported by pledging institutions. University of Michigan Press has also been an active participant in Knowledge Unlatched, which uses a crowd -source funding model to make previously published works openly available. Charles is also a Board Member of Knowledge Unlatched Research and will compare Lever Press with KU.

University of Ottawa Press– Lara Mainville, Director of University of Ottawa Press. OA publications are funded by the University of Ottawa libraries.

Moderator: Kevin Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas. Prior to joining the University of Kansas, Kevin served as Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications at the Duke University Libraries.

This workshop will provide attendees, no matter their role in their own institution, with the knowledge, vocabulary, and basic skills needed to communicate intelligently with other stakeholders in the fast-changing scholarly communication landscape.

the economics of commercial and open access publishing; open access publishing models; common misconceptions about open access and how to address them; predatory publishing; copyright, author rights and legislation; article-level- and alt- metrics, and open educational resources.